The present invention relates generally to reconciling financial data in financial data processing systems and more specifically to securely reconciling financial data between various financial processing systems using a business intelligence system.
Many financial transactions are electronically processed. As the number of transactions increases and the variety of different parties and their underlying processing systems increases, problems arise with settling these numerous transactions.
Existing financial institutions deal with large numbers of operating or transactional systems. These systems provide account data and other information that may be requested. These systems allow front end user interfaces for performing various financial activities. The front end systems can interact with back end processing systems that perform the computation and further processing of the financial data. Sending this data and reconciling the details of the data in the existing back end system associated with the user interfaces is a very time consume process involving a lot of users checking the correctness of these electronic financial figures.
One type of existing solution is an accounting driven solution. Banking and other financial customers are using accounting software and open item management tools to solve current problems. This solution may solve some underlying accounting issues relating to settling various financial transactions, but includes a significant amount of performance requirements. The accounting software includes numerous processing steps, including the generation of an accounting document, running clearing processes, updating any open processing items, posting account documents, changing accounting totals and archiving accounting documents. The numerous steps and requirements make it difficult for financial institutions to maintain this technique.
Another approach is a check sum driven technique. This technique can be electronically performed in batch operations through a sender and a receiver. A number of transactions between common parties are grouped together. The sender sends its balance of all grouped transaction, based on its internal records. The receiver concurrently sends its balance of all of its grouped transactions, which is also based on the receiver's internal records.
In a settlement device associated with the back end processing system, the balances for each the sender and receiver are compared. If the balances are equal, the grouping of transactions can be assumed to be reconciled, based on the calculated assumption that the grouped transactions for the sender are the same as the grouped transactions for the receiver. Although, this approach requires examination of the grouping as a whole, and in the event the groupings aren't collectively reconciled, the system must individually compare the transactions in the groupings, which can be a very time consuming task. Additionally, this reconciliation is done in the back end systems for each of the different financial processing systems, providing a disjointed settlement procedure between numerous financial systems and does not provide central settlement operations.
One direction of the banking industry is from a purpose-oriented reconciliation, which includes point to point and loans to accounting transactions, to a more industry-oriented information production process for many information requesters. As the finance functions in business intelligence systems become standard, there is a growing need for standard central reconciliation of these financial transactions, which presently does not exist.